Merrick Garland Is a Deft Navigator of Washington’s Legal Circles

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Merrick B. Garland, President Obama’s selection for the Supreme Court. He calls himself “an accidental judge,” because he was once in line for a top Justice Department position.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Twice a day, for breakfast and lunch, Benjamin R. Civiletti, attorney general to President Jimmy Carter, invited his seven special assistants — mostly young graduates of the nation’s most prestigious law schools — to his private dining room at the Justice Department for casual conversation or friendly debate.

Merrick B. Garland, fresh from a Supreme Court clerkship, 26 and looking years younger, showed little interest in chitchat. Even in staff meetings, he spoke so rarely that some colleagues figured him for shy or insecure.

But it became clear over time that Mr. Garland was silently working out his arguments, processing facts and testing alternatives. Surrounded by overachievers in a city full of people clamoring to be heard, he was waiting until he had something to say.

“He has a tendency to save up his points, and when he finally speaks up, his points come out almost like a Gatling gun,” said Lovida H. Coleman Jr., who worked with him back then and remains a close friend. “Not in an unpleasant way, not in a way of showing off. He was smart and to the point.”

Mr. Garland, now chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has deftly navigated the capital’s high-powered legal circles for decades.

In a city where ambition is often rewarded when accompanied by partisan loyalty, he has pulled off a rare feat, advancing as a centrist whose hallmark is finding the middle ground. His sharp mind — he was a standout in high school and at Harvard, and won clerkships with legal luminaries — has long commanded attention. Mr. Civiletti liked to tease Mr. Garland’s fellow assistants that he had a “résumé that makes you want to cry.”

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Mr. Garland, fifth from the left, with Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti’s staff in 1980.

Other judges, law school classmates and old friends describe his ability to deliver solutions, identifying areas of agreement, sometimes on narrow grounds, when people are sharply divided.

“The essence of who you are is who you are at an early stage,” said Abbe D. Lowell, a Washington lawyer who worked alongside Mr. Garland as a fellow assistant to Mr. Civiletti. “Not only is he book smart, but he’s really able to use all of that intelligence to forge consensus.”

In his rise to the top, Judge Garland, 63, has made canny decisions: choosing the Justice Department aide job rather than starting his career at a prominent law firm; later leaving a lucrative partnership to get trial experience as a federal prosecutor. He calls himself “an accidental judge,” because he was offered a judicial appointment while in line for a top Justice Department position.

He was guided in the ways of Washington and the law by various mentors: a Supreme Court justice, an Illinois congressman-turned-judge, a former corporate lawyer. But Judge Garland has thrived in part, many from both parties say, simply because he is nice. Several people used similar, somewhat surprising, language to describe the tough-minded legal advocate: “a sweet spirit,” Frank Keating, the former Oklahoma governor and a Republican, put it.

From his days as a high school student leader in the Chicago suburbs in the tumultuous late 1960s — where he spoke up for free speech yet shunned protests against the Vietnam War — to his time at the hypercompetitive Harvard Law Review, and through his years in Washington, Judge Garland has accumulated friends and seemingly made few enemies.

But when it comes to a Supreme Court confirmation process, his careful course could hurt as much as it helps. With Republican leaders refusing to hold hearings on his nomination and insisting that Mr. Obama’s successor should pick the next justice, conservative advocacy groups say there is proof, like his votes on gun rights or the fact that he volunteered for Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, that he is hardly as moderate as he may seem. Those on the left have their own complaints — that he is not a bold thinker or reliably liberal — but have mostly held back.

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Mr. Garland in the 1970 Niles West High School yearbook. As a student leader in the Chicago suburbs, he shunned protests against the Vietnam War.CreditNiles West High School

“He’s not an intellectual leader of the left or the right,” observed Tom Goldstein, an appellate lawyer and the founder of SCOTUSblog, a website devoted to Supreme Court news. “The people out there cheering for the Garland nomination are the professional legal class in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Goldstein said. “What you don’t see are the progressive, committed liberals saying, ‘Here’s our guy, let’s march into battle for him.’ ”

Judge Garland, aware that he is in for a tough slog, is “focused but calm,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, who overlapped with him at Harvard and met with him in the Capitol last week. In a 2013 panel discussion, titled Life Lessons Learned, the judge revealed his approach to dealing with the harshness of the city that has been the backdrop to his life’s work.

“They tell you in Washington that if you want a friend, get a dog,” he said then. “That is not true. Get a family. This is a hard place to be.”

Absorb and Integrate

Slightly built, with a full head of gray hair and a still-boyish face, Judge Garland is meticulous — to deal with partial colorblindness, he used to keep a list of which ties go with which suits — and easygoing by nature.

His success in Washington seems rooted in skills he learned growing up, said Barry Rosen, who first knew him as a Cub Scout and went on to Harvard Law with him. “He didn’t draw attention to himself” and “he was always a listener,” his old friend recalled.

Today, he has a talent for letting others talk about themselves. Whether in a meeting or at a party, he leans slightly toward whoever is speaking, head nodding. “He’s absorbing what he hears and integrating it,” said Martha Minow, the dean at Harvard Law School.

The future judge intended to be a doctor, not a lawyer, when he arrived at Harvard in 1970 from the Chicago suburbs, where he was raised in a family of modest means with a deep connection to their Jewish roots. (He saw medicine, and later law, as “a helping profession,” his sister, Jill Roter, said.) His mother served on the school board; his father ran a small advertising business out of the family’s basement; they helped found a synagogue in what was once a fish store. One grandfather, a Russian immigrant, was a lawyer, handling wills and traffic court matters in a one-man shop.

In high school, Judge Garland was a star debater, the class valedictorian, an actor who sang show tunes (including the title song from “Hair”), a teenager who took an exchange student to the prom because he worried she would not have a date. He was so well regarded that when Fred Eisenhammer, a classmate and a freelance sportswriter, claimed in The Chicago Tribune last week that Judge Garland blocked him in a relay race at summer day camp during junior high school, his old friends rebuked him, Mr. Eisenhammer says, insisting that “Merrick was the best.”

His parents were Democrats, though not activists; as a young man, Mr. Garland spent two summers volunteering for his hometown congressman, Abner Mikva, an outspoken liberal Democrat. (To this day, Ms. Roter said, she does not know her brother’s party affiliation.)

He navigated through a political controversy at Harvard in 1973, as the Vietnam War was winding down — and seemed to come out on both sides. At issue was whether to hold a student referendum on whether Harvard should reinstate a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) program. As a member of a student committee, Mr. Garland joined a unanimous vote, under pressure from a leftist group, to hold the referendum. Then, after resistance by the Harvard administration, he joined a unanimous vote against holding it. In the process, he never divulged his own view of bringing back R.O.T.C.

At Harvard Law School, as articles editor of the Law Review, Mr. Garland took on a delicate task, handling a submission by Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court, for whom he would eventually clerk. He was friendly with both liberals and conservatives, said Michael Chertoff, who was also on staff and went on to become secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think he was ever viewed in a particular camp,” Mr. Chertoff said. “He was a legal craftsman. He was not an agenda-driven person.”

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A look at how the work of the Supreme Court nominee Merrick B. Garland as a prosecutor for the 1995 bombing case helped shape his approach to the law.Published OnMarch 17, 2016CreditImage by Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Offers from law firms awaited Mr. Garland after he finished two prestigious clerkships, first with a federal appeals court judge, Henry Friendly, and then Justice Brennan, in 1979. But as someone interested in policy and problem solving, said Robert C. Post, a fellow clerk and now dean of Yale Law School, he was “really interested in connecting himself to people who were politically involved.”

For advice on making his way in Washington, Mr. Post said, Mr. Garland turned to Representative Mikva (who later became a federal judge on the same appeals court where Judge Garland now sits, as well as a mentor to Mr. Obama). They were so close that Judge Mikva later relied on Mr. Garland to vet his clerks.

In Mr. Civiletti’s office, the future judge kept the attorney general briefed on antitrust matters at a time when the Justice Department was trying to break up A.T.&T. and I.B.M., and he also helped address the legal fallout from the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. Some aides tried to use their access to push ideological agendas with the attorney general.

“That wasn’t Merrick,” Mr. Civiletti recalled in an interview. “He was interested in getting the right answer.”

As a young Washington lawyer, he developed a group of friends he would remain close to for years. They would go to parties at the Coleman family home, play volleyball or barbecue and dance late into the night to the Beach Boys and Otis Redding. Even though he was not skilled, Ms. Coleman, a Republican, loved dancing with him because he “smiled so much.”

In the office, he and the other young assistants were mentored by a colorful figure, Victor H. Kramer, counsel to the attorney general. Mr. Kramer had spent more than a decade at the corporate law firm Arnold & Porter before quitting to help provide legal services for the poor. He urged lawyers to work in public service.

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President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee spoke at the White House on Wednesday.Published OnMarch 16, 2016CreditImage by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

“In private practice, I spent my time learning more and more about less and less,” he told the assistants, one of them, Eric L. Richard, recalled.

Mr. Garland, who joined Arnold & Porter in 1981, ultimately chose much the same path. He was so eager to work on trials at the firm, he later said, that he spent “one winter in Helena, Mont., in minus 50 degrees.” But in 1989, shortly after becoming a partner, he abruptly quit, trading his corporate office, big paycheck and a portfolio that included antitrust cases, to become a workaday prosecutor in the office of the United States attorney here. (His financial disclosure forms show he is nonetheless a wealthy man, with $6 million to $23 million in assets, including trust funds established by the parents of his wife, Lynn.)

In 1995, Jamie Gorelick, a top Clinton administration Justice Department official, hired Mr. Garland to be her right-hand man. He was known as an exacting, demanding supervisor who often worked late and had high expectations for his staff. But he also found a way to get the best out of people and was quick to give others credit.

Years later, he told interviewers: “I like legal problems. I like learning about legal problems. I like cooperating with others in figuring out legal problems.”

At Justice, Mr. Garland also proved adept in the spotlight. He ran several high-profile national security prosecutions, including the case of Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, and the attack at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

But it was his work on the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that helped burnish his credentials with Republicans there and his reputation as a problem solver. He also knew how to navigate what Patrick Ryan, the former United States attorney in Oklahoma City, called the “daggone snake pit” of Washington.

When Stephen Jones, the lawyer for the accused bomber, Timothy J. McVeigh, complained to Mr. Garland about the conduct of a prosecutor, he said, the issue was quickly resolved. (A month before the president nominated Judge Garland for the Supreme Court, Mr. Jones, a Republican, wrote a four-page letter to the White House praising him as the “ideal nominee.”) When Mr. Ryan, a Democrat, refused Mr. Garland’s request that he ask Oklahoma City federal judges to recuse themselves, Mr. Garland did not insist. He just found someone in Washington to do so.

“I’m not used to Eastern politics,” Mr. Ryan said. “I found that most everybody with the exception of Merrick that worked in Washington, you have to be careful about trusting them.”

Finding Common Ground

During his 19 years on the bench, Judge Garland has tried to resist what can be an isolating job. He turns up at investitures, portrait unveilings and charity dinners and socializes with members of the city’s legal elite. He holds annual summer reunions for his fiercely loyal clerks at his home in Bethesda, Md., serving bagels and lox and cooing over their children, whom he calls his “grand-clerks.”

He tutors disadvantaged children and performs the occasional wedding. At the 2000 Nantucket ceremony of Beth Wilkinson, a top aide to him at Justice, and David Gregory, the former host of the NBC program “Meet the Press,” the nervous judge started the ceremony without the bride. “David turned to him,” Ms. Wilkinson recalled, “and said, ‘Merrick, don’t you think we should wait for Beth?’ ”

In his chambers at the imposing federal courthouse here, Judge Garland keeps a coffee pot “strategically placed,” he has said, so that he has to walk by the clerks to get to it, and can stop and ask what they are doing.

Rather than have them write long memos for him, as is the custom of many other judges, he insists on doing his own research, for fear that he might miss some nuance or the finer points of an argument. Then, he said: “We just argue it out. I pick clerks who can say no to me, in a nice way — who can say, ‘That’s wrong, judge, and this is the reason why.’ ”

His colleagues say that as chief judge, a position he assumed in 2013, he can find a sliver of common ground and build a decision around that. One pointed to a politically charged case that challenged the constitutionality of a ban on federal contractors making political donations.

Judge Garland pulled liberal and conservative judges toward the middle, issuing an opinion that upheld the law, but on the narrowest grounds. The final vote was 11 to 0; the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

On the bench, he is a tough questioner. “He would often come back from oral arguments and his first question to us would be, ‘Do you think I went too far out there? Do you think I was too rough?’ ” said one former clerk, Danielle Gray. “We all thought, ‘You could not have been nicer in asking these very tough questions.’ ”

Having been passed over by Mr. Obama twice — first for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and then Justice Elena Kagan, both more palatable to the political left — Judge Garland is, the White House hopes, a man for this moment. Still, even with his mostly-in-the-middle record, it may not be enough.

“If you wanted to game a Supreme Court nomination, you would go to one side or the other,” said Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general. “He surely had people whispering in his ear for years to do that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Court Choice Is Deft Navigator of Washington’s Legal Circles. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe